Hi Lostinoz,

I can't argue with your reason number 4 (fair enough), and I'm certainly NOT encouraging you to quit, but look...
- your parents will NOT commit suicide if you quit. Now if they're really into it, they might blame you or something, but it's a different story...  If it can console you a bit, mine would throw a massive party if I did quit. They think I look too good to waste my time studying and that I should focus on getting myself a rich husband, probably older too, and more clever so he's interested in me in the first place (you can't outshine a man, it's a well-known fact). I'm not kidding.
- your reason number 3 is typical of someone who is slightly depressed and needs a holiday! What does "better" mean to you?
- I disagree with your reason number 1. Quitting is very different from failing.

I think you need to try and get over it. Take a break perhaps? I'm quite serious - I'm not talking about staying home doing nothing, but you know, a weekend over at a good friend's or in a nice city you've always wanted to visit... I personally need a weekend away on every regular basis, I don't even wait for the blues to settle in. I'm going to York next, I hope before Christmas, then to Spain in February to see some friends, and probably to Cyprus with my family in March or April :)

Because I see you all doubting so much I think I'll write my own reasons though - in case I end up losing a bit my enthusiasm too at a point, it could be nice to come back to this:
1. I love my topic. It's the most fascinating topic in the world :p
2. I like research and, even if I'm not sure what will happen after the PhD, I want to enjoy the time I have ahead doing it.
3. The studentship pays more than my previous job.
4. I can't quite think of a job I'd do for more than two years apart from novelist, singer in a rock band... or academic. I find a PhD would be useful for career development in those three jobs.

Calling myself doctor is not a reason because I don't intend to stay in the UK all my life and, in my home country (and many others) you only get to call yourself that if you are a medical doctor. My family had quite a laugh when I told them ... making up stories about me writing prescriptions for a daily dose of Chaucer and so on...

For the images, if you can reduce the quality for now, I thought maybe you've got Photoshop on your Mac? Or somewhere on campus? (Sounds silly but most of the Macs I've used in unis had pretty much all the Adobe suites I can think of on them, expect for Audition).

With Photoshop (or an equivalent anyway) you can actually decide of the exact size of your pictures, really. Just make a copy of them for safety and work from the duplicates. Open them with Photoshop, then click File (I think) > Save as. You can change the format, some are more size efficient than others (eg .gif) and even for jpeg you can decide of the quality you want on a scale 1 to 12. This makes a significant difference in size in the end.

Hi Montezuma :)

Perhaps you'll have seen that I figured it out earlier... but it's really good to know it's not THAT old... well, in the grand scheme of things... and I've not been using Tiger for that long, I typically got it just before the release of Leopard pretty much - so I can forgive myself, lol.

I'm not sure about journals, but in literary publishing it is really quite common that writers rewrite whole passages... In fact I once met a publisher who told me they expected that to happen and made bets in their office about how much exactly would be re-written.

For a journal, as long your corrections do not affect the content or the length of your paper, I don't see why it'd be a big problem.

KB... I can't blame you for your reaction. I think I would have spat my beer out in his face as I chocked with laughter...

KB,

The fact that this man in your department has an IQ of 180 is useless.

Nevermind saying it anonymously on a forum like Cleverclogs, but saying things like that to people in real life (unless asked) is actually NOT smart. It's the best way I know to attract jealousy, contempt and hostility. I mean, I saw a documentary not long ago about a girl who went about saying she was just so beautiful, and it was so hard to be as beautiful as her because men looked at her all the time and so on, and she was surprised when she only reaped people's spite. It's the exact same thing as insisting on the fact your IQ is higher than average.

It turns out I am one of those who do not believe that IQs mean much at all, and I objected to having mine tested for a long time - my school back in the days kept insisting I had it tested, they said if it was as high as they imagined they could get me transferred to some kind of school for geniuses where I could 'integrate' better... I fail to see how singling me out even more was an answer to the problems I had then... and I'm now fairly sure I would not have scored as high as they expected.

I mean, if you take an IQ test online, it will not be precise, but it will give you an idea of what an IQ test can test. Maybe it is called intelligence, but it is only one form of it. If you're a scientist you may find it difficult to accept, but there surely is a big gap between being able to think logically and being clever. It doesn't seem so because admittedly, most people who can think logically are clever, but also because our conception of intelligence is a discourse governed by science. And evaluated officially by it, in the form of IQ tests...

Whaooo BilboBaggins, thanks so much for that.

It is 'create archive' on mine. Can't believe I'd never seen it! Surely it's going to make my life easier at a point.

:)

Hi Maria,

I think you've had very good advice from the others and I agree with all of it.
Things are not catastrophic. You can tie your hair up for a start :) And there are a lot of things you could do that are much worse. I, for instance, on my first 'real' presentation, kept a hand, flat, on the top of my head. For twenty minutes (- I have a very weird body language, naturally, I've had to work on this so much and it's still far from being good!). The lecturers were making notes all the time so they didn't notice (I think one of them only put his head up once I was finished), but my fellow students were certainly watching. I only stopped when a few of my friends in the front rows started to mimic me!

I did pick that up however:

Don't try and do that! First of all because if it is not 'you' speaking, you'll feel uncomfortable and lack confidence, but also because you don't have to be, look, or speak like a man in order to make a good impression.

Is that something on Snow Leopard maybe? Or did you download an app or plugin of some kind? I've never seen that on Mac and have been using them for more than 15 years!

I use Stuffit Expander. The version to decompress stuff only is free. The one to compress/zip is not, but you can try it for free, although I think I've been tld you need to enter card details (it's at http://www.stuffit.com/mac/expander.html).

Sourceforge seems to have a couple of programmes - you should check them out. Those are totally free and I've always found things of Sourceforge to be excellent and work perferctly on my Macs. Look at http://sourceforge.net/ If accessing from your Mac, it will display the page you are looking for straight away.

The online thing suggested below looks very interesting though, I suppose it all depends on the speed of your internet connection and the speed at which it compresses - I'll personally give it a go :)

Nice try, but you'd have to be quite old for your Latin and rhetoric classes to outdate mine :)

Back to the debate? Yes, sure, if you don't mind...

To be honest, I cannot blame Magnanti's father sleeping with 150 prostitutes. I know of men and women who have done worse. It's more of a problem if, say, she figured it out at a young age? Did her father hide it at all?



I must confess I have been very disturbed by this idea since yesterday. For some reason I pictured my MA sup' in that purple gown - she and Magnanti look alike...

Awwr, thanks! I have to say, for a non-native speaker, this goes straight my heart
:-x
You've made my day :)

Not quite, no. You're either overdoing it or over-interpreting things. Bear with me.

As some have rightly pointed out, you do not contribute to a debate at all - you state irrelevant things and focus on the (few) posts addressed directly to YOU and that YOU can tag some Latin unto and accuse of fallacy - you seem to like this by the way... so let's look at it more closely:

Argumentum ad hominem: where did you see that happen? Asking you where yourself and your views come from has been (as far as I see) mainly done in an attempt to widen the grounds of the debate. Most importantly, being the object of an ad hominem does not mean you "win" the debate. First, debate is not about "winning" or "losing", and second, there are dozens of posts that do not imply you as a person that you have simply ignored in your answers, as pointed out before (- ignoratio elenchi, perhaps, by the way?).

Straw man fallacy for Moonblue's post: if you feel you can accuse Moonblue of straw man fallacy (which I don't think is the case), you have to recognize the exact same goes for yours. Seriously, that one is blatant.

Argumentum ad populum: certainly not in Phdbug's post. You surely know that argumentum ad populum means that one assumes that because the majority agrees on something, then that something is true. Phdbug does nothing of the like. The post only states a personal opinion and asks the rest of us a question. Whether the question is rhetorical, I do not know - joys of written communication. Even if it was, it'd simply make it another personal opinion.

I can think of at least one instance of argumentum ad verecundiam in your posts on this topic - you might be pleased to know! And also, I'm not sure, but there must be a name for the process of trying to dismiss the arguments of others by means of using foreign languages? Reading your posts, I cannot bring myself to think it could be sheer pedantry...

Why, wait a minute, prostitution is not illegal everywhere. Surely that means something. In some countries where it is currently illegal there is an ongoing debate about 'reopening brothels' because if those were legal it'd be a way to control women and children trafficking, prostitutes could declare their real occupation and get appropriate medical attention, and so on - they could also pay taxes, by the way, which I suppose is of interest to many governments :p
Seriously, look at the case of Holland - they actually have things like pension funds and unions for sex workers. Theirs is clearly an example of legalisation bringing about a great number of solutions to a great number of problems... and the problems that are not solved yet can still be addressed openly.

Ok, the job remains unsafe all in all, but I think, given it has always existed and will always exist, legalisation is not necessarily the 'wrongest' route to go.

My, after all, until yesterday I thought that providing access to education was the best way for a government to keep girls out of this kind of jobs-on-the-side... How wrong! But what saddens me is that we always end up at the same point though - it's all about the money. Because really, if, to begin with, Higher education had remained free, I'm certain a great deal of this would not happen. I mean, you're brought up thinking you should avoid debt, and in this country you have no choice but to borrow so much, in order to finally get a job that pays so little, then you borrow even more to make sure you have a roof over your head... it never ends, and I think I understand why some girls might go for such dangerous options as prostitution in order to avoid that kind of life. I suppose it's easy to see it as the temporary hurdle that precedes a decent life, sort of.

:-(

Has anyone read the Guardian today?

I quote:
'Among sex workers themselves there was little surprise that a well-educated woman like Magnanti had got into prostitution. "Loads of people who work in the sex industry are academics – education is a very expensive habit," said Catherine Stephens, an activist for the International Union of Sex Workers who has been a sex worker herself for 10 years. "At a brothel I worked in, I think I was the only one not doing a PhD."

The full version of the article is here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/nov/15/diary-london-callgirl-phd-student-brooke-magnanti

No comment :-(

Love it:

'The linguistic construction of history as such asks to be read as the discourse of the nation-state.'
I could totally use that. Pretty much as such. :p

I mean in any case I'm going to make a note of it and a few others and recite them to my friends at the pub tonight during the game - it should be a good laugh :-)